The Thibaults (112 page)

He found two bundles of letters of equal size labelled: “Lucie’s Letters,” “Oscar’s Letters.” The latter packet was tied with a silk ribbon, and inscribed in a sloping, school-girlish handwriting. Probably M. Thibault had piously preserved it exactly as he had found it, after his wife’s death, in her escritoire.

Antoine hesitated about opening it; he could come back to it later. But it happened that the ribbon was loose and, as he pushed the packet away, his eye was caught by some phrases which stood out, words instinct with reality that called up from the shadows a past of which he had never dreamt, still less had a glimpse.

I shall write to you again from Orleans, before the Congress opens. But, my darling, I want to tell you tonight that my heart beats for you alone, to beg you to have patience, and to try to help you through this first day of our week of separation. Happily Saturday is not so very far off. Good night, my love. Why not keep the baby with you in your room, so as not to feel so lonely?

Before continuing reading Antoine got up and locked the door.

I love you with all my heart and soul, my best beloved. To be separated from you has for me a sharper sting than the bitter frosts of this foreign land. I shan’t wait at Brussels for W. P. to come. Before next Sunday I shall press you in my arms again, my darling Lulu. No one can ever guess what our hearts know; no two people have ever loved as we two love each other… .

That his father should have penned such phrases was to Antoine so amazing that he could not bring himself to slip the ribbon round the packet and lay it aside. All the letters, however, had not the same fervour.

Something you wrote in your last letter has, I must own, displeased me. I beg you, Lucie, do not take advantage of my absence to waste time practising the piano. Mark well my words; the sort of ecstasy that music induces is apt to have a pernicious effect on the temperaments of young persons; it accustoms them to idleness, to letting their imagination run away with them, and may even lure a woman from her proper duties.

Sometimes a note of actual bitterness crept in.

You don’t understand me, and I now realize that you have never understood me. You accuse me of egoism—me of all people, whose whole life is spent in serving others! Ask Abbé Noyel (if you dare to) what he has to say on that subject! You would thank God for, and be proud of, the life of self-abnegation that I lead, could you but grasp its inner meaning, the high moral purpose and spiritual fervour that inform it. Instead of that, you give way to sordid jealousy, and all you can think of is how best to hinder, for your own selfish ends, the claims of these philanthropic societies which so greatly need my guidance.

This, however, was an exception. Most of the letters were couched in a deeply affectionate tone.

Not a line from you yesterday, not a line today. I want you so badly that

I hunger for a letter from you each morning in the most absurd way; it’s my daily ration, and when I wake and find it missing I have no heart for the day’s work. Well, today I consoled myself by rereading that exquisite letter you sent on Thursday—breathing of true love, and purity, and noble feelings. Surely you, my dear one, are the guardian angel God has posted at my side. I am vexed with myself for not loving you as you deserve. True, you have never complained; but that, my love, I know is because you make it a rule not to complain. But how base of me it would be, were I to feign to ignore my shortcomings, and to hide from you my remorse!

Our delegation has had a very fine reception here, and I have been given a flattering place in it. Yesterday there was a dinner for thirty, with toasts to us and all the rest of it. I gather that the speech I made in acknowledgment was much appreciated. But don’t think that such success in public makes me forgetful; between sessions, all my thoughts are for you, my best beloved, and for our little one.

Antoine was greatly moved. His hands were trembling a little as he put the packet back in the drawer. M. Thibault had always referred to the “dear departed saint” with a special kind of sigh and a glance ceilingwards, when recalling some past incident in which his wife had been concerned. But this brief insight into an unsuspected period of his parents’ younger days had told Antoine more about them than all the allusions made by his father over twenty years.

The second drawer likewise contained bundles of letters: “Letters from the Children,” “Reformatory Boys.” “The rest of his family,” Antoine thought.

He was more at home with that phase of the past—but no less surprised. Who would have dreamed that M. Thibault thus preserved all Antoine’s letters, and all Jacques’s, even the few letters Gise had sent, and kept them in a special dossier, “Letters from the Children”?

On the top of the pile lay an undated, but very early note; a few words awkwardly pencilled by a little boy, whose hand his mother must have guided.

My dear Papa,

I kiss you lovingly and wish you many happy returns of the day.

Antoine.

For a moment he lingered pensively over this ancient relic, then passed on.

The “reformatory” group of letters seemed comparatively dull.

Honoured Sir,

We are being transferred this evening to the lie de Ré. Before leaving the prison, I would like to express my gratitude for all your kindnesses …

To My Kind Benefactor

Sir,

He who writes to you and signs this letter is one who has returned to the fold of honesty so I make bold to ask you for your kind testimonial and enclose a letter from my Father asking you kindly not to pay to much attention to the gramma. My two little girls pray every night for Fathers Godfather as they call your honored self… .

Sir,

I have now been 26 days in custody and am at my wit’s end because the investigating Magistrate has come to see me only once in all that time, in spite of the petition I submitted showing cause …

A stained sheet of paper, headed “Montravel Prison Camp, New Caledonia”—the ink was yellow with age—ended as follows:

… hoping always for better days, I beg to remain, honoured sir,

Most gratefully yours,

Convict No. 4843.

Antoine could not help feeling moved by these expressions of trust and gratitude, all these pathetic evocations of his father’s helping hand.

“I must get Jacques to have a look at these letters,” he said to himself.

At the bottom of the drawer was a little package without any inscription; it contained three amateur photographs, dog-eared at the corners. The largest showed a woman some thirty years of age, standing at the edge of a pine forest on a mountainside. Antoine held it near the lamp; the woman’s face was totally unknown to him. In any case the style of dress—ribboned bonnet, muslin collaret, and leg-of-mutton sleeves—showed that the photograph must be a very old one. The second, a smaller picture, showed the same woman sitting bare-headed in a public square, or possibly the garden of a hotel; under the bench on which she sat a white poodle crouched sphinx-like. In the third the dog had been taken alone, perched on a table, its muzzle pointing upwards and a bow-knot of ribbon on its head. In the box was also an envelope containing the negative of the large photograph, the mountain scene. No name, no date. On a closer view, Antoine judged that, though her figure had not lost its slimness, the woman might be older than he had thought at first—forty, perhaps, or more. She gave an impression of warm vitality and, despite the gaily smiling lips, of thoughtfulness; Antoine, who found the face attractive, pored over it for a while, unable to bring himself to put the photograph back into the box. Most puzzling of all—or was it only autosuggestion?—he was getting less sure that he had never seen this woman before.

The third drawer, otherwise almost empty, contained an old ledger, which Antoine all but failed to open. It was bound in morocco leather stamped with M. Thibault’s initials, and, as a matter of fact, had never been used as an account-book.

On the front end-paper Antoine read: “A Present from Lucie for the First Anniversary of Our Wedding. Feb. 12, 1880.”

In the middle of the next page M. Thibault had inscribed, likewise in red ink:

NOTES

for a

History of Parental Authority

from the Earliest to Modern Times.

But this title had been struck out. Evidently the project had been dropped. “A quaint hobby, that,” Antoine smiled to himself, “for a man who’d been married a year, and whose first child was yet unborn.”

After skimming through some pages, his curiosity was whetted. Few were blank. The changes in the handwriting showed that the ledger had served as a note-book for many years. It was not, however, a diary, as Antoine had begun by thinking—and hoping—but a collection of quotations presumably jotted down in the course of reading.

Still, Antoine reflected, the choice of the quotations might well be enlightening, and he studied the first pages with an inquisitive eye.

Few things are more to be feared than making the least change in established order. (Plato.)

Buffon on the sage: Content with his lot, his one wish is to remain as he has always been, to go on living as he has lived; sufficient unto himself, he has small need of others.

Some of the excerpts were rather unexpected.

There are sour, bitter, and naturally churlish hearts which render likewise sour and bitter all that enters into them. (Saint Francis of Sales)

There is no soul in the world that cherishes more warmly, more tenderly and passionately than mine; nay, I even exceed somewhat in loving-kindness. (Saint Francis of Sales.)

Prayer may have been accorded man to permit him to utter a daily cry of love for which he need not blush.

The last aphorism was written in a fluent hand, and no source was given. Antoine assumed that his father was its author.

Thereafter, indeed, M. Thibault seemed to have got into the way of inserting the fruits of his own musings between his gleanings from the works of others. And, as Antoine turned the pages, he discovered, with keen satisfaction, that the commonplace-book seemed very soon to have diverted from its original usage and become almost entirely a record of its owner’s personal meditations.

At the outset most of these apophthegms had a political or social trend. It looked as if M. Thibault had from time to time jotted down such general ideas as might come in handy for his public speeches. There were quite a number of those phrases opening as a query cast in the negative form— “Is it not obvious that …?” “Must there not be …?” and so forth—which had been so characteristic of the old man’s thought and conversation.

The authority of the head of a business is amply justified by the efficiency that lies behind it. But is there not more in it than that? For industry to achieve its maximum output must there not be loyal co-operation among all those contributing to that output? And nowadays is not the management the only organization which can ensure that spirit of co-operation among the workers?

The proletariat is up in arms against the inequalities of life, and stigmatizes as “injustice” the marvellous variety ordained by God.

Do we not tend to forget nowadays that what a man is “worth,” on the material plane, almost invariably determines also his worth as a good citizen?

Antoine skipped two or three years. Opinions on topics of general interest were gradually giving place, it seemed, to meditations of a more personal order.

Is not what gives the Christian his wonderful sense of security the fact that the Church of Christ is also a temporal power?

Antoine smiled. “These high-principled folk,” he mused, “given zeal and courage, can be more dangerous than real scoundrels. They impress everyone—especially the better class of people, and they’re so convinced they have the Truth (with a capital ‘T’) in their pockets that they stick at nothing to ensure the triumph of their principles. At nothing! Yes, I’ve seen Father at work; for the good of his party, for the success of one of his charities—well, there were times he did some rather curious things! Things he’d never have dreamed of doing for his own sake, to make money, or for his personal advancement.”

His eyes roamed the pages, settling now and then upon a phrase.

Is there not a proper, nay, beneficent form of egoism—or, rather, a way of putting egoism to the service of virtuous ends: for example, using it to buttress our religious zeal, not to say our faith?

Some of the aphorisms might have struck a reader ignorant of M. Thibault’s personality and life as positively cynical.

Charities. The grandeur and, above all, the inestimable social service rendered by our Catholic institutions (benevolent societies, the Saint Vincent de Paul Sisterhood, etc.) lies in the fact that the relief they distribute rarely finds its way to other than deserving folk, such as accept their lot; they run no risk of encouraging discontented, rebellious spirits who are always chafing at their humble station and prating of “social injustice” and their “rights.”

True charity does not aim at the happiness of others. May God give us the strength to deal harshly by those whom it is our duty to save from themselves!

The same ideas seemed still to preoccupy him several months later.

One must be ruthless with oneself—to have the right to be severe with others.

Among the virtues unrecognized as such, should we not set in the first rank, considering the hard schooling it requires, what, in my prayers, I have so long called “case-hardening”?

In the midst of an otherwise blank page stood this injunction, peremptory as a trumpet-call: